6. Choice, Context and Disciplinary Literacy: In Conversation with Marcello Giovanelli

Join us on a linguistic journey with Marcello Giovanelli, a renowned expert in literary linguistics from Aston University, as he shares a wealth of insights that will transform your understanding of language, literacy and beyond. In this episode, we delve into Marcello's latest book, written with Jennifer Webb, Essential Grammar (Routledge), a pivotal guide for educators and students seeking to enhance their understanding of language in literature. Their combined expertise offers a new lens to view the integral relationship between language mastery and academic success.

This podcast episode explores the unique linguistic identity inherent in different academic subjects, highlighting the profound impact of language awareness on student comprehension and achievement. We reflect on groundbreaking initiatives that integrate language skills across the curriculum, emphasizing the importance of clarity and transparency in academic writing. Our discussion is a call to democratize education by providing learners with the linguistic tools they need to excel in any academic field.

Challenging the status quo, we scrutinize the often compartmentalized teaching of language and literature within the English discipline, particularly poignant in the UK education system. A holistic approach that encompasses language and literature together is championed, celebrating recent advancements and the educators leading the charge. As we acknowledge the critical role that language education plays in society, from media literacy to combating misinformation, we conclude with a salute to Charles Dickens' exceptional command of language, which has enriched our discourse and promises to inspire our listeners and learners.

For more insights from Marcello, follow him on X: @mmgiovanelli and to get your copy of "Essential Grammar," visit Routledge. 

Chapters

• 0:19 Language Awareness in Education
• 10:59 The Importance of Language in Education
• 20:02 Challenges and Potential of English Education
• 30:58 Language in Literature Education

Transcript

Andy: 0:19

Welcome to the Literacy Works podcast hosted by Bedrock Learning. I'm Andy Sammons, the Head of Teaching and Learning at Bedrock, and in today's podcast we have Marcello Giovanelli. I wanted to hunt him down from the day we started the podcast to ask him to come on. So thank you so much for coming on. I can't even imagine how busy you are. Marcello was a name of one of my A-level textbooks from years ago and he obviously is a well-known name in A-level language teaching, but I think his reach is starting to go beyond that. So before I bore you anymore, I just you know with my words here. Marcello, could you give us a bit of an into? You know who you are and what your role is and what you're focused on at the moment?

Marcello: 1:00

Yeah, thanks, andy, no problem at all. So I'm actually a reader in literary linguistics at Aston University where I'm also the Head of English Languages and Applied Linguistics. So my the bulk of my work really is in taking linguistic models and theories and ideas and applying them to understanding literature. Wow, so that's literary linguistics, sometimes known as stylistics. That's my research area I guess I've always been interested in. Well, I see myself first and foremost as a linguist. I don't really see myself as a literary scholar Interesting. Okay, I guess that's the important distinction to make. And you know my love of language really, and certainly my commitment to seeing language at the heart of the English curriculum, goes back a long way to probably starting when I was an English teacher myself. I spent the first 11 years of my career as a secondary teacher. I was a.

Marcello: 2:04

Head of English, assistant head teacher, head of sixth form, deputy head teacher at the end, yeah, for 11 years, and you know that sense of what English is a very difficult subject, I think in HE and secondary and primary, but certainly in secondary there's a lot of tension between the section of there being a language bit and a literature bit. I've always found upon that and thought that was a very misguided compartmentalization. So I've always championed really seeing language and literature as part of the same thing and certainly seeing language as probably the best way to access literature actually and to teach about literature, because, after all, literary texts are made out of, you know, a form from language, and I think what we know from modern linguistics is really, really useful to help us think about literary texts. Yeah, so yeah, that's kind of where I've come from. I guess I've been in a high school for 14 years, so a bit longer than I was in secondary education, but I don't think I've ever lost that interest in the school side as well.

Andy: 3:15

It's interesting because I'm a language A level teacher kind of, but that's what I did. I did linguistics universities very similarly, and I've played with the language and literature A level course and just notionally I like the idea of that more than the two separate courses because I think using linguistics to understand the texts themselves that should we were striving to, I think. And more recently you've written about, you've written a book with Jennifer Webb, haven't you? Essential Grammar? How did that come about and what was the kind of the idea behind that and what is the book?

Marcello: 3:51

basically, yeah, it's really interesting. First of all, it was a great book to work on, one of my favorite things I've ever done, and Jenny is amazingly talented and wonderful and I learned a tremendous amount from working with her as well, so it was a really good experience. I think we met about four or five years ago when she was a keynote at the Team English Conference in Peterborough.

Andy: 4:15

Was it the one in Peterborough?

Marcello: 4:17

Yeah, I think it was Peterborough. It was pre COVID and she was a keynote and I did a session then. So we sort of got to know each other from talking about the sessions of each other we attended.

Marcello: 4:30

And then about a year later I'm not quite sure how, but we again ended up talking to each other and suggested that we might work on a grammar book together, that sort of the, the, the HE parts of the linguistics part from me, and then the, I suppose, the more practical awareness of schools agenda that Jenny brings, and of course she's got some wonderful thinking as well about sort of structuring teaching and curriculum and also the importance of senior leadership teams being involved in curricular design and so forth.

Marcello: 5:09

So we started from very, very different places and I think we probably in many ways didn't really always understand the other others position, but by the end it really felt like a compromise of ideas, and a very positive compromise of ideas as well, because that book certainly wouldn't have looked the way it did had I written it on my own, and I don't think it looked the way it did had she written it on her own. So it was a great example of of two people coming together and really working, you know, productively together to put something that couldn't have existed without, without both of them. So it was a great book.

Andy: 5:51

And what do you think you did achieve with the book then, because I've read parts of it and I think it's great. But from the author's perspective, what do you think that compromise was?

Marcello: 6:00

I mean, for me the most important thing is always, you know, helping teachers, or hopefully helping teachers and students trying to see that, to see the importance of language as a thing to study in its own right, but as a thing to study that is important to help them do what they need to do, which is, you know, study text and pass exams and the rest of it. I think what what Jenny brought to the project, and what she did really well, is also convince teachers of some of the broader scope, of a broader scope to that as well. So, for example, you know, grammar for writing, grammar for academic language, threading ideas around grammar and language through the curriculum, as I mentioned a few moments ago, the importance of senior leaders being on board and understanding the things that we were talking about, and she writes in that position now, which I don't have. For me that's a long time ago. So I think I think we kind of captured lots of different audiences.

Marcello: 7:04

You know teachers who might be really into language but just wanted a decent resource. Teachers who were a bit scared of it and wanted something to help them. Teachers who were heads of English who perhaps wanted to know a bit more how it might all fit together, and then senior leaders who were looking at how the aspects of English might inform schemes of work, programmes of study more broadly as well. So, yeah, it felt like a neat book with lots of things. And I should add, we should have said this at the beginning. We were very clear in the book that when we talk about grammar because one of the issues with grammar is it can be quite a scary off-putting word that we were really talking about what we were calling and it's the term that got used many, many years ago language awareness. I think he's a better phrase to use than grammar. I mean technically, grammar is just around the sort of structure of the language. Language awareness is understanding language as a phenomenon, as a social phenomenon in all its different forms, so much more good to use.

Andy: 8:09

Yeah, and I think what you're getting at there is almost a little bit. You know, we've termed it, we've termed it in. We've termed recently as disciplinary literacy, the idea that actually, what we're really trying to teach when we're teaching pupils disciplinary literacy for example, in an essay, you know, writing a hypothesis statement and a topic sentence and all those things we're trying to teach them language awareness, aren't we? We're trying to teach them and trying to make them aware of how an expert lives, thinks and breathes in this field, and I suppose that's what you're trying to get at there, really, isn't it?

Marcello: 8:40

I think so. Yeah, and you know, grammar has unfortunately over the years, and in the hands of the wrong people it's synonymous with correctness and prescription and proscription, and it's not. You know, our book isn't about that at all. Quite the opposite. We argue vehemently at the beginning that this is not about teaching people to say the right things. I think, if you reframe that an ex-colleague of mine, Ursula Clark, who puts this really well in a book she did a few years ago, where she argues that we should be talking about registers, not grammar, you know, and register is a really neat term in linguistics because it's all about the right form of language for the right context. So there's no wrong form of language, it's just that some forms are better for some contexts than others.

Marcello: 9:33

So, if you can teach students about the importance of register, that's a really good place to start. That's the angle we took, that we weren't supposed to talk about getting things right or telling people you know there's no wrong. It was a much broader understanding of what language, language awareness, language knowledge could be in a school context.

Andy: 9:54

We have at Bedrock, we have a system, we have a core system that focuses on vocabulary and grammar, and our grammar system is what you might call a mastery curriculum, where they, the pupils, will take a holistic assessment at the beginning and it will give teachers really granular feedback about what you term there as the correctness element of it. But then what pupils do is they work their way through sequentially through a curriculum where they learn about independent clauses before they're taught compound sentences and things like that. So we've got the correctness bit in there, but I think what we're trying to do as an organization is we're trying to ask senior leaderships in particular and heads of faculty to join their thinking about what might this look like across the school. So it's not just about having the platform oh, where you're green, green, green blue, whatever it is. Actually, what does this look like in the curriculum across the school? So what are your thoughts on what this?

Andy: 10:46

What register, if you're talking about that, what register? What disciplinary literacy? What are your thoughts on what that does look like across the school? How would the school go about, start to go about doing that, do you think?

Marcello: 10:58

So really good question. I guess there are different demands in different subject areas. I mean, I've just been having a conversation here. I asked and actually got this that you know everything is mediated through language. It's not one single activity that we do as humans that isn't language mediated in some shape or form. And I guess subjects are like that as well. Every subject is effectively. It has its own language, it has its own discourse and its own specific needs.

Marcello: 11:35

You have to learn how to write like a scientist to do science well. You have to understand how history reports are put together, how chronology works, how to tell stories to do history well. So I guess and again we touched on this a bit in the book, I think, or Jenny did in the talks that she wrote you know, getting different disciplines to understand they have their own. Let's call it grammars, if you want to call it. That is really enabling for students and important because you can't, you can do the sort of practical bits of the scientist and actually a big part of being a scientist is developing and working with a particular style or register of language. So getting good at that is really, really important and I guess schools have to know that. I mean, maybe this is going back before your time and some of your listeners' times, but there was an initiative in the 2000s under the new Labour government called Literacy Across the Curriculum.

Andy: 12:40

Now, once you know something, when I've worked in schools, as obviously until fairly recently, you go into like dusty old covers and you're just yeah, there's some languishing, there. Yeah, yeah.

Marcello: 12:51

But, but, but they. I mean you know all the, all the things that went wrong with those national strategies, and lots did go wrong. The actual materials were really good and one of the central tenets of those materials was that literacy isn't just a thing to teach in English, and really literacy meant language awareness, really, you know. So there was, there was the, there is the onus. There was, and I think there's still is, the onus on different subjects to play in developing, you know, generic language skills and language awareness, but also specific ones that are required for their subjects, because that's how you breathe the next set of historians as well. You get them to think.

Andy: 13:34

I don't know. I don't know what your thoughts are on this, but I remember being at school and I was always really verbally good at English. I was always really kind of, you know, probably to the annoyance of my classmates I used to come up with ideas all the time and I love discussing. My teachers fired my imagination and my interest for these things and really got a mys and men, Romeo and Juliet. And I remember just somehow getting better marks in that subject because I wasn't particularly bright. I was sort of middle of the road, sort of, you know, just under average in terms of my classes. I wasn't, you know, top of the class but my passion and my love of what I did carried me over the line and I suddenly started just getting better grades in that subject of English, naturally, which is probably why I am where I am now.

Andy: 14:16

But then I go to science and I find it it's a bit. It's quite sad really. I've always had a really natural interest in science. I was always on paper, useless at it. No one ever kind of really sat me down and or taught me in a lesson how a scientist writes. You know what a write up looks like, how this piece of key knowledge links to the way this report should be written. It was never codified, or, and I think there's a there's a wider point about what you're saying here about and we talk about it all the time but you're about the democratization of knowledge, because I was naturally English and that carried me through. I wasn't at science, and this is how you breathe the next kind of generation of scientists, historians, by codifying, by teaching, register and by helping as many through it, come you know, bring them into the club as possible. It's quite an emotive subject really, isn't?

Marcello: 15:08

it actually. Yeah, I completely agree with that. I mean two things to add. In a book I did a few years ago, I called again I'm using these terms interchangeably language awareness, knowledge about language grammar. I called it the great leveler because I do really think it is. I think you can take a look, you can mitigate against what you're saying, which is that some students will naturally, if they're comfortable looking at literary texts because they have that natural disposition or perhaps at the end of the support at home or there's something in their favor that enables them to do that. But I think if you learn even a little bit about how language works and I'm talking really here about literary, linguistic, stylistic stuff that I mentioned at the beginning you can do a tremendous amount with just that little bit of knowledge and it really can be that leveler. And I, fundamentally, if you had to pin me against the wall and say what is the one thing you believe in? I believe in that. I really really do, and I've seen it happen as well. I see that happen in schools I've been in. I see it happen with my own students here at Aston.

Marcello: 16:22

The other thing is, yes, the thing about the registers and different subjects.

Marcello: 16:25

I mean again, one of the things that the strategies tried to do 20 or so years ago was to introduce and this is an idea that originally came from Australia the idea of different academic subjects as different genres of writing, really, and so you learn about those genres, or you use the word visible, which is a really good one.

Marcello: 16:48

You make visible what those genres of writing and speaking look like. And to make visible, you have to do that in explicit linguistic terms, and that doesn't mean you have to know lots and lots of very difficult, complex things, but it does mean you need a systematic and transparent meta language, which is mine, and I despair, really, when I see on social media people knowing the fact that students are using the word noun in an essay or verb, and I think, well, what do you want them to use? They're using a word for which there is a definition that everybody kind of knows and understands. It's clear, it's precise, it's transparent. It's exactly the kind of thing that you want students to be doing, and so that visibility, making visible, opening up how things work and, equally, when you're writing yourself, being very clear and transparent, are really good things to have.

Andy: 17:46

Yeah, and something I've been thinking about over the last few weeks since I've joined Bedrock is part of our role is to kind of work with teachers, work with schools about, you know, making sure that there is a really clear plan in place and that you know, it's not just about an ed tech platform that uses homework and then off your title, it's actually. It's actually about how you can bring those, bring that explicit instruction, into the classroom. It's interesting that you say that actually there's a lot of, there's a lot of things that actually got missed from that early. You know about the literacy strategy that got actually got missed and we could still be using now. I mean, where do you think we are now as a country when it comes to this stuff? What do you think you know in terms of our ability to teach this stuff? And, you know, have we been brought on, do you think, by this discipline or literary discussion? Do you think we're in a healthier state now?

Marcello: 18:34

or where do you think we are?

Andy: 18:36

In English generally in terms of, I guess what you might term what I initially began this, this interview, talking about grammar, about technical accuracy, language awareness, register in schools and teaching people's about what that looks and sounds like.

Marcello: 18:57

Yeah, I think it's. It's still a complex picture for lots of different reasons, so I'll try and sum some of them up. I think modern linguistics now knows an awful lot, a lot more than they did 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, 50 years ago, and so there's there's a really exciting work going on in terms of what we know about language, and, equally, there are some really good people, some good linguists, who are very interested in education and making their knowledge applied. I mean thinking about Debbie Myhill, for example.

Andy: 19:33

Yeah, I love her work. Her grammar for writing is really helpful.

Marcello: 19:35

It's fantastic and that's a really good example of actually, you know, using what we best know from linguistics to support outcomes, student outcomes and teaching and learning in writing, which of course, is such an important thing. And she's done it in a way which isn't around rules and prescription and so on, but has opened up knowledge about language more generally. So that's a great example. However, I think there's still is that that langlit split, that langlit problem, as I've called it before, that compartmentalization. Some of that is the fault of universities. In fact, I'll be as bold to say a lot of that is the fault of universities who continue to offer degrees in English that are effectively English literature, although the landscape has changed, thankfully, Since I was an undergrad, but it's still the case. And I think you know one of the unfortunate byproducts of that and this is not the fault of teachers, of course is that you still have a significant number of teachers coming into post in schools who have no background in language at all and have simply done degrees in English literature. So you know, in the same way, they might feel uncomfortable teaching maths or physics. They're not going to be really comfortable teaching teaching aspects of language.

Marcello: 20:58

So for me, that's the real central problem and it's peculiar actually to the UK. It doesn't have to come as marked as this. It really is a peculiar phenomenon, that's. That's it's. You can't enter. Until we get over that, until we see English as a, as an integrated subject that has elements of language, literature, film, media, drama, you know it's, it's broad and wonderful diversity. We're always going to come up against some of these problems that we've found. That said, again, you can see, I think that's what just happens in forwards. No, I think that's.

Andy: 21:34

I think that's fair. I like the idea that you're staying there about bringing it, making it a more cohesive offer.

Marcello: 21:39

Yeah it has to be. That's about subject identity and there are, you know there are people in the subject community, both in secondary and higher and primary education, who have wanted that to happen. Some people have wanted that to happen for years. But also you know there are and this is what I often reflect about. What's different now, sort of looking from the outside on secondary teaching world to when I was a secondary teacher, and what is really different is that you have got brilliant people. You know Jenny's one of them highly.

Marcello: 22:14

You mentioned you know, as you mentioned a while ago as well, you'd interviewed on this program. You have got these really top people doing, producing really good books and resources, and you know, you've got events like research and lit drive team English, those those sorts of things that just weren't around when I was around.

Marcello: 22:34

Yeah, I mean it was a very I had a relatively very impoverished diet, yeah, yeah, compared to what's on offer now. So that's the good news You've got brilliant people in the subject community doing brilliant stuff, inspiring, you know really inspirational people.

Marcello: 22:57

And then you've got you know, I suppose, groups of bodies or organizations that's what it has been around for a long time and have done tremendous work and are still carrying that on as well. So I'm thinking of Nate's sense and Nate's. So the landscape is good, I think, and it just takes a bit of joined up thinking at a higher level to, you know, a government level, really DFE level, to sort of help us reconceptualize this subject for the 21st century, because at the moment this mentalization is really difficult. Yeah, I find it interesting.

Andy: 23:34

There's a couple of things there. So, firstly, I wholeheartedly agree with what you're saying about subject identity and those people that you mentioned specifically. Because my English teaching was light years, you know it was miles away from where it got to by the end, for what that's worth, things like you know, hypothesis statements in its dressage, topic sentences, analysis, evaluation sentences, how to actually phrase a conclusion, two-part conclusion you know bits that are going to help pupils tick boxes for exams, yes, but actually help. I mean I had, by the end of my time in teaching recently I had pupils who were what you might call lower prior retainers, who were able to say Shakespeare, a positive writing in the Jacobean era, comma uses Macbeth as a vehicle to and conceptualizing at that high level. And it wasn't just because I taught them that sentence structure, it was because I taught them what an appositive was, it was going to talk them, what a subject was and what the predicate was. And I taught them all those things and the function of that language was so important, not just to, you know, trot out a sentence then, but actually because they had a deeper understanding of what the author or the authoral intent, what they were trying to achieve.

Andy: 24:42

And I think secondly and I don't know what your thoughts are on this, but if we were to bring some of this insight you know this to a more cohesive offer, I think that we could help, we could support young people into becoming much more kind of discerning language users when they read newspapers, for example, when we have this era of fake news. We have this era of disinformation who someone's disinformation, someone else's news? I accept that completely, but I just think it was looking at language. We're looking at those brilliant terms. You have in English language, a level like positioning presupposition. You know those really nice technical elements. They're not just a kind of a term to get higher AER1 in an exam, but they're actually tools through which you can interpret what's going on in your society, and I think that's the big place we're missing at the moment.

Marcello: 25:38

Yeah, I mean that's. You know that that's sort of critical, critical aspects is absolutely vitally important. I guess from the you know the language bit of that is that you're right, language is highly patterned. Actually, you look at any text and look at, if you're, if you know what to look for, you can see patterns and patterns create meanings, and so that's, you know that that's.

Marcello: 26:06

For me, that's always been the positive thing about teaching what I do at university, which is stylistics, which is all about that, which is all about encouraging students to see how texts are patterned and what those interpretive effects of patterns are.

Marcello: 26:18

And if you do it the other way around, of course you can also argue that that's useful for their own text production. So they are writing critically and writing carefully and thinking in it. You know how again, this comes from some of Debbie Miles work she talks about, you know, language as putty, language as choice, and they're really, they're really quite important ideas. Actually, you know, in any, any decision, any linguistic decision we have, we can choose one word or structure over another, and those are often arbitrary, they're often done for very particular reasons, they often give rise to very particular effects, and that's all about, again, this visibility, this, this making things open, this, this sense of you know, teaching students to see the value in precision and having a systematic knowledge of how language works, and not just around structures but around some of the stuff that goes on around the outside as well.

Andy: 27:21

And then does that does not happen overnight, does it? That needs to be? You know, almost linked to the question from before about what, what the curriculum looked like over a long period of time.

Marcello: 27:31

What's a child? You know it's historical as well. I mean no-transcript. I'm using these terms interchangeably, so apologies if I'm wrong.

Andy: 27:41

No, it's fine.

Marcello: 27:43

But language awareness grammar stop being taught in the 60s for good reason actually, because the kind of teaching that went on before that and there were some great examples, you can still find some of the 50s textbooks online were just simply pointless. The noun in a sentence label, the adjective in a sentence made up sentences that nobody would ever use. Research showed that these sorts of teaching methods had no impact at all on learning outcomes. What unfortunately happened is that the whole thing just stopped. It broke out completely and I guess that coincided with the lack of interest in education from university linguists. That didn't really change until the late 60s, early 70s, with some really good initiatives that went on in London.

Marcello: 28:39

Some of your listeners may have heard of Michael Halliday, for example. Yeah, one of many schools council projects linguistics. But again, if you've got generations of teachers who haven't studied language themselves, it can be really really hard to pick it up, even at a later age. So a lot of the initiatives in the 70s and 80s were well intended and actually the materials are superb, and some of these were off the back of a number of government reports, such as the Bullock and the Kingman report. But I think still think it was generally patchy. I went to secondary school in the 80s with 80s, late 80s, and I had no language teaching at all and that's only really changed ironically incredibly ironically with the advent or sort of the return of grammar teaching at key stage two. It's 11, 12, 12, yeah.

Andy: 29:41

It's interesting, isn't it?

Andy: 29:42

And this stuff is real and it does impact people, because when I went to university, I went off the back of doing language and doing about discourse analysis and power and child language acquisition and all the stuff that you've written about in your books.

Andy: 29:54

As I said before, I've studied some of the stuff that's definitely that you've written, but then when I got to university, I had a good few months of getting an academically bloody nose because it was really hard to start thinking about Noam Chomsky and Grammar Trees and it was, oh my goodness, syntax. I used to dread those things and I was that part of that generation who grew up on everything, just interpret everything. But actually you need the technical knowledge in order to make the interpretation, which is why, as I say genuinely, I'm extremely interested in that Lang Lit A-level that you, that you that perhaps I'm sure you've had some work, that you've done some work on that, haven't you, I think, using linguistics as a way of interpreting and looking at those texts as a real, living, breathing thing, I think that just just fascinated. Could you give us, just before we finish, could you give us an insight into that in terms of how that looks?

Marcello: 30:50

The Lang Lit spec.

Andy: 30:51

Yeah.

Marcello: 30:52

Yeah, yeah, if I make, I just step back and just say a tiny couple of other things, just about Absolutely. The first thing is, you know I said ironically, we've got returns in grammar teaching at primary school. I mean that really is a good and a bad thing. It's good because you have got students doing that explicitly now and coming into secondary school with some language awareness, which you know is an opportunity for secondaries to build on. It's bad because the tests are not good at all and I really a return to the sort of fifties style of pedagogy and testing that I've criticized earlier. So it's a difficult thing and there are people who feel strongly in both camps about that. The other thing to sort of mention, of course, is that you mentioned a level English language and I'll say a few bits about that before I do that, lang Lit, the.

Marcello: 31:45

It's wonderful to hear you. You know your own interest in that and that really has been the success, I think, of the last 30 odd years in the post 16 arena.

Marcello: 31:57

That's the growth of a level English language, from from literally being nothing, from being a small pilot study in the 80s To being, you know, growing to it's peak. You had 25, 30,000 students. I mean it's decreased now because of the you know, as we all know, the, the general decrease in student numbers at post 16. But you know it really is a success Phenomenon that that a level and and that's down to a lot of people who've got that going and you know people who've worked on those Specifications it's giving me everything. It's giving me everything great in early 2000. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to be thankful for there Because otherwise, you know, the future would have looked. It's even Perhaps does a little bit. Now Langley is interesting because you know, for me that's, that's always been my natural home, because I've always been a linguist, but I've always had that, that literary sensitivity as well, and it's, it's just always seen common sense to apply what you know about language to be collections of language which are literary text.

Marcello: 33:08

The a level itself is has undergone a number of identities.

Marcello: 33:13

I mean originally it was conceived as something Not kidding here, something that people might do on a Wednesday afternoon instead of playing football.

Marcello: 33:21

No, yeah, do a little bit of sort of English that has little bits of both and it's developed over the over the years, again largely through, through, you know, teachers and and another you know academics have been interested in, in helping it to grow into, into a version of English that is Genuinely felt to be, you know, useful and, you know, of value to students.

Marcello: 33:50

Unfortunately, it's never had the growth at post 16, even though I think in the last set of Reform, the last reform seven or eight years ago, it really sort of stepped up to resemble Much more what it's like in higher education at the moment, but I think it's 100%. English is either language or literature. In fact, you know, I I often hear stories of the course being Split up into Lang and lit bits, where you get one teacher saying I'll do the language bits, another saying I'll do the literature bits, even though I'm talking about the, the largest of the awarding bodies version of this aqa, even though when that was set up it wasn't meant to be like that. It was meant to be as an integrated Subject it's funny.

Andy: 34:37

I heard colleagues at the time talking about that type of scenario and I'm thinking Isn't that gonna be confusing if you start pulling those two elements apart, because they're literally supposed to be about integration? Isn't it synergy between?

Marcello: 34:50

the two it is, and the point is that I mean there was, yeah, there were lots of Sort of academic arguments for that. I still stand by the the central fact that literary text are made out of language. My Rob Pope, who used to work at Oxford Brooks University, who I know quite well, he always used to say literature is made of language, not spaghetti. Yeah, so yeah that the problem with the problem with conceiving literature and otherwise is that it becomes. It starts to become other things that are not English, so it starts to come about history, or it starts become about sociology, or it starts to become about biographical studies, and so that that's what happens when you don't see language as essential to I think it's important to add.

Andy: 35:47

Actually, at that point, feel free to disagree, but I think things like history and sociology are interesting and philosophy, things like that are interesting lens through which to access the literature. You know, I had all kinds of amazing fun when I taught Christmas Carol and Macbeth Interrupting through a young Ian and Freudian lens and all those wonderful things you can do to start to dig in and understand the characters more. But it's not. It should be that language is the primary vehicle, primary thing through which you investigate the text.

Marcello: 36:17

Yeah, I think that's a really good way of putting it. The not to you know discredit those approaches, but you, you can I, I would argue you can get a much better, deeper understanding of a Christmas Carol by looking at fellow's language and you can from understanding you know 19th century history. Yeah.

Andy: 36:40

I think there's bits that that help you understand in more depth. But I completely agree and I think there's so much to be unpicked through what Charles Dickens I mean. I read it every year. I think it's my favorite. I don't care who says what, it's my favorite book, it's my. It's a story that I watched it I watched Scrooge as a young lad and it. I love the story before I love the book and it means a great deal to me. That and it says a lot to me, that story. And I think I agree that the language is what has always been the glue for that story for me, because there's bits in the, in the films that I heard that I now see in the books and that's my journey. I'm not, I wasn't picking up and reading books from the age of three. I wasn't. I've come to it later in life and I think it's really important that languages the glue, the whole tool with that together.

Marcello: 37:29

I think so. Yeah, you look at, look at Dickens, and you, you, you, you can work out why he's such a great writer and what he does. But that's a you do that through looking at the language. Really, you know.

Andy: 37:41

I agree.

Marcello: 37:42

We're not saying Dickens is a great historian or sociologist. Yeah, you know he was a great political commentator.

Andy: 37:49

But first and foremost, yeah, he is, yeah, yeah, he's a good user of language and I think I think that's a, I think that's a really lovely place to finish and and you know, sincerely, thank you for your time, because you know we're part of the Part of the thing of speaking to you know interesting people is that interesting people have got lots to do. So you know, sincerely, thank you for booking this time in with us and talking to me today. It's I know that I know this will be a popular part, so thank you on behalf of everyone who's listening in and that it means a great deal and, yeah, hopefully we'll speak again.

Marcello: 38:24

You're very welcome. It's great to talk to you. Take care, thanks, andy.